Producing hydrogen from water with electricity isn't really viable as it uses too much electricity (and the hydrogen needs mega strong tanks etc). To produce this fuel, seems they need to produce the hydrogen first, split CO2 from air, combine the CO2 and hydrogen at high pressures and temps (even more electricity). Handy if you own your own wind-farm or nuclear power station... But then you'd make more selling the electricity elsewhere?

Does seem a good idea. I'm not a chemist and the plausibility of combining carbon from carbon-dioxide from the air with hydrogen split from water hadn't occurred to me but the method does seem obvious when pointed out...

Still, the problem for this would be - Where would all the electricity come from? Green energy probably wouldn't be plausible - I wonder what percentage of the earth's surface would need to be covered with solar panels and/or wind farms to make enough electricity to produce this bio fuel?

Roll on nuclear fusion reactors, and while we're at it, roll on Star Trek style matter replicators! Mind you, if the latter existed I'd probably just replicate V8 petrol engine components and build myself a muscle car then run it on LPG

Find yourself a few gallons of the old 5 star petrol (105 octane if memory serves correctly)

No, it was only 101 RON but you can get 105 RON if you have a local airfield, it's Avgas. Guy I know used to buy it from an airfield and run an MGB in Classic Sports racing on it. The regs were very strict on engine mods and you had to run on pump petrol. When they couldn't understand how he managed to get that much more poke out of his engine than everyone else they looked a bit closer. His argument that the petrol did come out of a pump, just one that was normally used for filling Cessnas, didn't wash......

Don't doubt you Gilbert mate, I did know aviation fuel was higher octane, but is it to 5 star spec with the lead etc? I know current unleaded is brewed to a higher octane than 4* was before the lead was added too..

No more energy in the MGB's 5* as in 2*, better performance must have come from higher compression / more ignition advance? We can do the compression and advance trick with LPG too (higher octane than 5*), but then LPG doesn't have quite as much energy as (any grade) petrol...

One of the last cylinder head (gasket) jobs I did was on one of my old GV's, anyway at that time I asked the head skimmer bloke to remove X thou from my heads to increase compression to a static ratio I'd calculated. The compression increase would have meant too high a compression for the engine to run at full load on petrol but I wasn't concerned about that and reckoned the SC would have been fine on LPG, increasing mpg and power. I was talked out of it by the head skimmer who told me at the time that removing more metal might weaken the heads or cause valve clearance issues (which I doubt). Looking back,I don't fully believe him, don't think he wanted the work. Wish I'd had the work done elsewhere as an experiment but when my car was off the road and I had the heads to repair it presented on a bench in front of me, which I could simply take away and fit to get the car back on the road, that's what I did. I still aim to modify heads on another car sometime as an experiment though. Problem is, many modern engines have so little valve/piston clearance in the first place, but not the GV.

Years ago I used to mod Ford Pinto heads to 13:1 static compression. With fairly long duration cams they didn't detonate, economy was excellent (didn't breathe well at low rpm but higher compression made up for that), peak power was nearly double standard engine rating. All due to just a bit of head skimming, port work with a dremmel, a 4 branch exhaust manifold and modified distributor. Last one I did was 14 years ago to replace a CVH in a Sierra, felt just as torquey as standard at low loads/rpm (while using less fuel) but went like an XR4 (proper V6 version not the pretending 2L version) at higher rpms.

Yup, Avgas has the lead in it too so it is still compatible with older stuff like Austers and Tiger Moths.

The extra grunt in the B came from being able to run more ignition advance, work on the engine internals wasn't allowed so no way of increasing the compression.

I know manufacturers advise against skimming, or skimming more than a certain amount, but it often doesn't weaken the head that much. I know a couple of engines where the way round too much off the heads means you just fit two head gaskets to get the compression down to something that will run and give you back the valve/piston clearance. My P38 engine has had the heads skimmed at least 3 times to my knowledge and runs a consistent 165 psi per pot. Now whether you take off atmospheric so that would be around 150 psi or not I don't know but even then, that would give me a CR of over 10:1. Standard for my engine is 9.35:1 so it has definitely made a difference. I've had to fit 50 thou spacers under the rocker pedestals to stop the hydraulic cam followers bottoming out too (a lot cheaper and easier than shorter pushrods!).

You should take your heads to my local guy. If you told him to skim 50 thou off a head, that's what he'd do. He builds racing Zetec engines for stock cars as well as general machining and quite often is up to his knees in aluminium swarf......

I used to get great satisfaction from admiring the grey inside rim of my cars exhausts after a long drive back in the day.. Not running too rich or burning oil, shame to ruin the look on short drives later Tetra-ethyl, magic stuff for petrol helping make cars viable back then, octane boost and valve protection from same thing, shame about the birth deformities etc...

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